


Definition

by altairattorney



Category: Free!
Genre: Birthday, Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-13
Updated: 2014-12-13
Packaged: 2018-03-01 08:23:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2766242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altairattorney/pseuds/altairattorney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To Rei, beauty is a memory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Definition

**Author's Note:**

> Happy birthday, Rei. My beautiful butterfly with violet eyes is growing up, everything is a good excuse to write cavity-inducing fluff.

To Rei, beauty is a memory. 

He has no other way to define his first concept of beauty, the strict one, bound by norms and calculations. He remembers that natural grace as much as he knows the ache, the devastating effort required to reach it. He had once thought that beauty itself was a contradiction -- something so innate to the world, and yet so hard to reach. It was a hopeless game. 

He is not sure of how or when it changed. Not exactly. It was a small difference, a little step with every passing day. And then, at one point in the flurry of his life, he had opened his eyes, and it was no less than normal to see it in everything. 

After all, looking back at his past, it does not make any less sense. It takes bent and broken lines to make the world more complex, chance and mistakes to create evolution. To show the true harmony of things, all rigid shapes have to melt in round, irregular ones.

 _Yes,_  he thinks with a smile.  _That is how it works._

Not so long ago, there would have been nothing good in this -- no charm in the icing and the discarded wrapping paper, nor in the crumbs of cake his friends have spread all over the table. Nothing endearing in the way their cheeks flushed when they apologized. 

No beauty in their laughter, their hugs, his shameless sobbing. No beauty in his life.

Yes, that is what his life has become, and he does not regret it in the slightest. Not a single minute of it. He takes advantage of the fact that they are gone, and Nagisa is a sleeping tangle of hair and oversized woollen sweater in his arms, to hold on to this memory even tighter.

Redrawn like that, beauty is in everything -- no point in seeking it to the slightest detail. It is already there for him to see. He just watches him breathe lightly, like a child, while the end of the sunset draw bizarre patterns on their faces.

Everything in that bundle of flesh looks unruly and disastrous. It is enough for him to fall asleep happily, amused at how fast he changed his mind.

So much of beauty is a mess, and he is definitely content with it. 


End file.
